Philippe Apeloig Through a Friend's Eyes, by Keith Godard
New York 2004

Keith Godard is a british Graphic Designer. He works in New York since the Sixties. He is an AGI member

I first met Philippe in New York in the early 90's. He had just returned from Los Angeles where he'd been working with a good colleague of mine, the graphic designer April Greiman. I found him to be a sensitive young man who was much enthralled by America. Like many other enthused visitors to the USA before him, Philippe found the "land of the liberation of ideas" very engaging and compelling.

I thought he appeared European in a subtle sort of way but not particularly French. It was about five years later after our first meeting that I learned of Philippe's Eastern European background, the historical struggles that were part of his ancestry, and the social upheavals and political strife that drove his family out of Poland to seek refuge in France. Such elements would also impact on his life.

I saw their effects fall into place when he became passionately interested in a teaching position at The Cooper Union School of Art in 1999. After a long search for an instructor with Philippe's extraordinary talent and zeal for synthesizing visual ideas, the Art School invited him to join the Faculty. I viewed his choice of the teaching job as him repeating his parent's history, in so much that he was immigrating away from the stifling bureaucracies that pervaded life in France. He felt the need to broaden the scope of his work and came to America seeking a milieu that would stimulate his imagination. It's ironic that he would return to France three years

later. But Philippe is a searcher, always seeking the new and innovative in his concern with history's struggles and a determination to survive. Ten years have passed since Philippe first arrived in the 'New World'. Over that time, he has emerged with his youthful curiosity still intact and an impressive body of work. He and I share the inescapable fact of being Europeans: a state that implies certain inherent influences. I can see the Englishman very evident in my own work where I've held on somewhat to a tradition of visual narration. Philippe, however, is so typically un-French in his manipulation of abstract forms.

In the early part of the 20th century, France did not embrace the teachings of the Bauhaus and other organized design philosophies. Such new ideals found themselves up against certain French attitudes that claimed they were too doctrinaire. (This obstinate stance surely slowed the evolution of French design.) A preference arose in France for phasing out the once-popular art nouveau movement and blending it into surrealism until it morphed into the "moderne" of the 1930's.

It's interesting to note that the words 'graphic design' were actually not integrated into French vocabulary until the 70's. Prior to this decade, graphic work was viewed as being executed by 'artists'. Britain also adopted this course rather than drawing on German and Eastern influences. The closest Britain ever came to the European avant garde was to engage with vorticism, an offshoot of Italian futurism. It's no wonder that both Philippe and I both found more fertile ground to explore our design talents on the other side of the Atlantic.

Philippe is an intellectual who endeavors to heighten the meaning of the written word by "exploiting its graphic nature." There is truth when he writes, "I like carefully constructed and painstakingly conceived typography." He has one foot planted in being a visual poet and the other set in his role as a graphic designer. He compares graphic designers to actors who interpret an author's words.

He is influenced by the Russian Constructivists and the Bauhaus, but not in the manner of the Swiss with their dogmatic underling grid structures that they conform to, but in a much freer way. This permits his work to be more akin to cubism and the surrealist poets like André Breton. It is not surprising that his admiration for Cassandre and Massin is more prevalent in his typographic inventions than in the work of his young contemporaries who follow styles that are, more or less, in and out of the moment and who participate in the illegibility of distressed typography.

If you look beyond the occasional reference to European movements in Philippe's early work compared to what he's producing now, one can clearly see the emergence of a sincerity of personality, an earnestness that professes design and typography as the visualizing of ideas which elevates these arts to a higher, more purposeful meaning, a significance that emits social missions.

It was certainly Cooper Union's loss, and, indeed, perhaps America's when Philippe decided in 2002 to return to Paris. One cannot fault him for doing so. Aside from his cultural roots, it was the place, where, prior to his arrival in New York, he had produced brilliant work. His successes include poster creations for the Louvre and the Musee d'Orsay, "October in Normandy" and "Chicago" (probably one of the most published posters of the 80s). Philippe has the spirit of the nomad who loves to travel to gaze at the urban world more so than responding to the natural landscape. He indulges in seeing architecture and the texture of life in the streets. While Philippe easily embraces new ventures and seeks out progressive ideas, he functions like a traditional practitioner. Despite his utilization of the latest electronic equipment, he enjoys being in total control of every typographic character in the execution of his projects. He always carries out the work on the keyboard himself.

To commission Philippe is not like engaging a typical graphic design office where the business of design often supersedes the practice of design. His personality comes along with the work, in a comparable vein of designer as artist in his studio. In his posters I find such appropriate intelligence of typographic form and content. Fine examples are: "Henry Moore Intime,""AnnŽes 30,""Present - Day South Africa," and "Bateau sur l'eau rivieres." In these posters the type associations derive from actual letterforms and are not just made-up illustrations of letters.

Philippe has arrived in his middle-years as a voyager through graphic design who has realized many accomplishments and traversed several significant plateaus in his work. In his continuing romance with the written word, he now sees himself as writing more in his sunset years.

Writers who are the authors of books, and I mean books without pictures, very rarely participate in the final production and design of their works. However, Philippe could quite well be the rare individual who would orchestrate his own fiction into a typographic expressive form. What comes to mind is the extraordinary book by Markus Kutter, "Schiff Nach Europa", designed by Karl Gestner in 1957, that interprets the voyage through expressive typography and makes the words 'speak' by using various sizes and weights of type.

I envision Philippe's longevity as a continual experiment with "Inside the Word" (Au coeur du mot"), which is the title of his first book, published by Lars MŸller Publications. I envision he will render his typography in traditional book form as well as in technologies that are incomprehensible to us at present. May he live another 50 years.

written by Keith Godard